Privacy

OpenChapter is run by Kadawala Hetti Arachchilage Akasha Nadeel Gunathilaka, a sole trader in Sri Lanka. Any question about this policy, or any request about your own data, goes to contact@openchapterapp.com.

OpenChapter stores your books so you can return later and keep writing. There is no AI in OpenChapter: your writing is never sent to a language model, and we do not sell your data or use your writing to train anything. We do run one advertising measurement tag, described below; it never sees a word of your manuscript.

PDF export sends the full book to our server for layout. Word and EPUB export are built in the browser.

In your browser storage, OpenChapter keeps working data such as:

• Your local library, books, chapters, titles, order and manuscript text.
• Draft setup data while you create a new book.
• Editor preferences, theme and writing layout settings.
• Local copies needed for fast editing and offline-safe recovery.

Only when you sign in or use paid billing:

• Your account — your email address and any profile details provided by the sign-in provider.
• Your library — books, chapters, prose and metadata, synced so the work survives a lost device and follows you to another one.
• Your subscription — which plan you are on, the billing cycle, payment provider identifiers and the paid-up period end. We do not receive or store card numbers.
• Usage counters— how many title checks you have run today, synced with your other settings so the free plan’s daily allowance is the same on every device.
• Feedback you send — the message, topic and account it came from.
• An activity record— which parts of OpenChapter you use and when: that you opened the app or a book, wrote, imported or exported a file (and which format), ran a title, price or consistency check, opened Ideas, parked an idea or started a book from one, looked at pricing, started a checkout, or reached a free-plan limit (and which one). Each entry is the kind of thing that happened, the time, and your book’s internal id where there is one. It never holds a title, a file name, an idea or anything else you wrote or typed. It is kept while your account exists and deleted with it.

The person who runs OpenChapter can see, for running and improving the service: your email address and when you signed up, your activity record, your books’ titles, genres and chapter and word counts, your plan and payments, and any feedback you sent. They do not read your chapters, your notes or your covers from that view — it cannot show them.

• The title check — the title you type is sent to our server, which searches Google Books and Open Library for it and returns what they hold. Only the words you typed are sent; none of your manuscript goes with them.
• The Market check— the genre you pick is sent to our server, which reads Apple Books’ public list of best-selling ebooks for it. Nothing about you or your book is sent to Apple. The covers in the list load straight from Apple’s servers, so Apple sees that your browser asked for them.
• The Market check’s Amazon tabs(Pro Plus) — our server asks OpenWeb Ninja, a data company, for Amazon’s best-seller, new-release, movers and most-wished-for lists in the genre you pick, and for the details of the books on the best-seller list. Only the genre and those books’ Amazon ids are sent; nothing about you or your book. The answers are kept on our server for up to a week (a book’s details for up to a month, the trend lists for a day) and shared by every Pro Plus member who opens the same genre. The covers load straight from Amazon’s servers.
• Dictation— the microphone buttons use your browser’s own speech recognition, not ours. While you are dictating, the browser sends the audio to its maker’s service to turn into words; in Chrome that is Google. Nothing is sent while it is switched off, and the feature exists only in browsers that offer the engine.
• Making a PDF — PDF export sends the full typeset book to our server so a browser can lay it out and return a PDF. The generated file is returned to you and is not stored as a permanent file by OpenChapter.
• Sync — if you are signed in, your library syncs to our database.
• The activity record — if you are signed in, each of the moments listed above sends one short entry to our database. Opening the app, a book or Ideas, and writing, is recorded at most once every half hour. Nothing is sent when you are signed out.
• Advertising measurement— we run search ads, and every page carries Google’s conversion tag so we can tell which advert brought somebody who went on to make an account. It reports the page address and the usual details a web request carries, and nothing else: not your books, not your chapters, not a word you have written. It is the site’s only third-party script, and it is switched off entirely on any deployment that does not set the key for it.
• Payment — when you subscribe, checkout is handled by the payment provider. Card details are entered there, not in OpenChapter.
• Choosing a plan on the public pricing page— pressing a paid plan’s button there records the plan, the billing cycle you had selected, and which page you pressed it on. That is how we tell whether people want the monthly or the annual price before they have an account to ask. If you are signed in, your account and email address are recorded with it; if you are not, nothing that identifies you is. No other detail is taken, and the record is not shared with anybody. Pressing the same button from inside your account records nothing — it goes straight to checkout.

The launch MVP does not publicly offer the older research, collaboration or publishing-workflow tools. Their old API routes are hidden for launch by default. None of them sends your writing to a language model either — the routes that did were removed.

If you have an account, authentication cookies keep you signed in. The advertising tag above sets one of its own, in our name rather than a third party’s, to carry the identifier of the advert you clicked from the page you landed on to the page where you sign up — which is the whole of what it is for. We run no other advertising cookies, and none that follow you to anybody else’s site.

Your library stays until you delete it or ask us to delete your account. Deleting your account removes the account and the data held under it.

• A copy of your data.
• Deletion of your account and synced library.
• Correction of account data.
• An explanation of anything in this policy.

This is a tool for authors preparing books for sale, and it is not directed at children. Please do not use it if you are under 16.

If this policy changes, this page changes with it. A change that affects what leaves your browser will be stated plainly.